Hello there,
My name is Ryan O'Rourke and I am a freelance web designer. I design and build beautiful, useable web sites, I would love to help build yours. I strive to provide the highest quality work at the most reasonable prices.
Featured work,
Concept for a new faculty lab template for ASU's Biodesign Institute. Challenge was to adhere to ASU web standards and still make it stand out.
"How Much?"
Price, obviously, is determined by what you buy. There is product differentiation between web sites just like anything else. In the interest of being competitive, I don’t make my rates public. But if you'd like to submit a project request, I'd be more then happy to discuss what it would cost and why.
Why You Need It
It's 2009, every company needs an online presence. If for nothing else than to be open to the search’s of hundreds of millions of people. That's the minimum. A good web site will take you beyond that. It will give you a brand, an identity, a showcase. Unfortunately there are a lot of ways to screw that up. Nothing makes an organization look less sophisticated than a half-assed web site. That's not me.
Web Design
The first step in any project is the design, but that design has many steps. We will chat either via the phone, video, or in person and decide exactly what your website needs to have. Once I have a clear mental picture of the different features that need to be included I fire up Photoshop and start creating compilations. I typically go through three comps before I am happy with one to show you. After you take a look we will chat again about what needs tweaking. If it's not the direction you intended I will go back to the drawing board and create something new, until you are happy with the results.
There are plenty of designers out there to choose from, but very few with my high standards. I build clean layouts and user interfaces, providing an enjoyable and intuitive experience for you and your customers from start to finish. Can do designs from scratch, or a complete re-fresh of your existing web site.
Web Development
Once a design gets the "green light" from you I start cutting up the Photoshop file and adding it into CSS/XHTML (the technical building blocks of modern websites). I test all my websites to be compliant with every major browser. Most people outside the web industry don't understand the work that goes into making a site look the same on Internet Explorer 6 as it does on Firefox 3.5 (my favorite).
I don't create designs I can't build. Your design will be turned into a beautiful standards compliant web site. All CSS/XHTML will validate.
Graphic Design
Web design is a specific subset of graphic design, but I am not limited to just pushing pixels destined for online life. I have a wide variety of high-end graphic design abilities. From business cards to vehicle graphics, shop signage, and anything else that needs a look to set you apart.
Content Management
Modern web sites are typically controlled via a content management system, or CMS. They allow individuals who don't otherwise have experience with updating web sites to quickly and easily change content, blog, manage inventory, track users... anything really.
I work with a few of the industry standards; Wordpress, Drupal, ExpresstionEngine. My typical process is to create a design, develop that into a working web site, then build a custom theme for the CMS. CMS's can dramatically improve your web site workflow. Plus all the cool kids have one.
Search Engine Optimization
This is how easy your site is for search engines (like Google, or Yahoo) to find and list. It is not an exact science, but it's getting there. My web sites are built from the ground up to be search engine friendly, with clean code and best practices in mind. Sites built in this fashion will generally achieve better search rankings, and help drive more visitors to your site.
I can also set up pay-per-click programs where corporations like Google will drive a specific number of people to your site each month. The number of visitors is based on how much you want to pay. The viewers find links to your site through targeted searches so they tend to be more likely to buy a product or listen to what you have to say.
